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Viagra 'stops pregnancy disorder' Tests on rats by a team at University of Vermont College of Medicine showed no offspring died in the pregnancies where mother rats were given Viagra. UK experts said the finding gave hope for future treatment of the condition. The US research is to be presented to the International Union of Physiological Sciences meeting in San Diego, US this week. The scientists studied rats with induced high blood pressure. Half were given Viagra, while the rest were left untreated. There were no deaths of foetuses in the pregnancies treated with Viagra, but 11% of foetuses were lost in pregnancies in untreated rats. Viagra works by inhibiting the action of an enzyme called PDE-5, which prevents the expansion of arteries. The researchers found the drug did not lower blood pressure, in the rats, but it did have beneficial effects. The arteries in treated rats were much wider than those in untreated animals, allowing better circulation of blood and nutrients. The offspring from these pregnancies were also of a normal weight. Surviving offspring from untreated rats were around 20% smaller. Professor George Osol, who led the research, said more work was needed to confirm his findings. But he added: "These findings are exciting because they suggest that Viagra may have beneficial effects in hypertensive pregnancy and possibly, pre-eclampsia." Mike Rich, chief executive of the charity Action on Pre-eclampsia, said: "Using Viagra would not cure the pre-eclampsia, but you could potentially get to a point where you could prolong a pregnancy by enabling better blood flow." Hypertension in pregnancy raises risk of later cardiac death Women who develop hypertension during pregnancy are at increased risk for death from ischemic heart disease years later, according to a report in the March issue of BJOG: an International Journal of Obstetrics and Gynaecology. The findings are based on a study of 325 women who developed hypertension during pregnancy between 1931 and 1947 and 629 normotensive controls matched for age and parity. The subjects were followed until the end of 1996 for cardiovascular events and cancer. The rate of death from ischemic heart disease among case patients was 24.3%, much higher than the rate among controls (14.6%), Dr. Reynir T. Geirsson, from Landspitali University Hospital in Reykjavik, Iceland, and colleagues note. The rate of cerebrovascular event-related deaths was also higher in the hypertension group, at 9.5% vs. 6.5%. In contrast, no difference in cancer death rates was seen between the groups, the investigators point out. As a result of increased cardiovascular mortality, survival in the hypertensive group was cut short by an average of 3 to 9 years compared with controls, the authors estimate. However, this effect depended on the age of the women when the hypertensive pregnancy occurred, with the effect being less pronounced for pregnancy at a young age. Further analysis showed that the risk of death from ischemic heart disease rose as the severity of hypertension in pregnancy increased, the authors note. "Pregnancy hypertension may not only be an expression of underlying genotypic and phenotypic hypertensive tendency, but have its own adverse and [long-term] effect on the endothelium and the cardiovascular system," they conclude. Two proteins beat proteinuria for diagnosing pre-eclampsia US researchers have described a urine screen for pre-eclampsia that they believe is superior to proteinuria and gives an idea of the severity of the condition. Given that serum levels of soluble fms-like tyrosine kinase 1 (sFlt-1), vascular endothelial growth factor (VEGF), and placental growth factor (PlGF) are altered in pre-eclampsia patients, the investigators considered whether urinary levels of the proteins also have diagnostic potential. Led by Catalin Buhimschi, from Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut, the team assessed free urinary levels of the proteins in 68 women, who they divided into the following groups: nonpregnant reproductive age (NP-CTR), healthy pregnant control (P-CTR), pregnant hypertensive and proteinuric without severe pre-eclampsia (pHTN), and severe pre-eclampsia (sPE). The results showed that "sPE is associated with increased urinary
output of the antiangiogenic factor sFlt-1 and a decreased output of PlGF
at the time of clinical manifestation, providing a rapid noninvasive screening
of hypertensive women based on a sFlt/PlGF ratio," the team reports.
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